The sky is overcast yet our mood is jubilant. I pull over to the side of the road and stop. The wheels halt their smooth motion and begin to wait. She turns to me and she says, oh this she says with puzzlement in her eye “Jericho, Jericho why have we stopped here? There is nothing to see, nothing to see but the hills.” And I say what it is that I am amazed she cannot see on her own. “My dear, this is the beauty of it.” I smile and she laughs and I turn to our companions in the backseat. They have names that would not escape me for the world. “Salem,” I say, this I say with a glint in my eye, “it is not yet late and the city is not yet close. Where shall we roam?” He laughs gaily and kisses the hand of his beloved, a figure I know only as Hazel. “The grasses here are as good as any for those that would share with them the soles.” I cannot help but agree. We open our doors with a staggering sound in this emptiness that is silence, leaving them open as if in respect for the air itself. Thievery is unknown here, the word as much as the deed. Hazel smiles bemusedly at her love but it is plain she does not comprehend. A pity it does not matter. We begin to wade into this sea of jade, waist-high and rippling. Alive and welcoming, drawing us into its fold. Susannah places her hand in mine, hips swaying slightly, so slightly to the silent music pervading our atmosphere. We hear it as it hears us, neither knowing the other yet seduced with a mutual fascination. And so we walk, we dance. The grasses rise to a point, a lone elevated body here. Two trees, great beasts of bark and green breath intertwined. Their shape is beauty impossible, their image unknown. We rest our foreign backs against their bodies. Shoes slip off easily, toes sinking into the natural mat and deeper, into a soil somehow more alive than those who come here today. She turns to me. “Look at the clouds,” she says, sighing. “Jericho, look at the clouds.” I close my eyes and they are there. Billowing, screaming across the sky at a pace far from frantic. Yet they can’t help but move, the wind sliding amongst them, living there amidst the entrapped expanses of light, mist and melody. “Jericho, you are not looking.” I can feel her smile. “No. I am seeing.” She laughs and we sit for a while, her head a welcome weight on my shoulder, her fingers hiding in my own. Life is here and it is living. I remember why I hate the city. I open eyes that saw clouds to look beside me. Salem there, the woman there, her head against his chest and her eyes closed. They are of a color I cannot remember. I raise my own to his and see the tears screaming, their voices long lost. To summon a rueful smile seems the most fitting response to this observation but I find I cannot. My own tears are fitting. They will have to be. She does not know, oh the things she does not know and I can’t help but wish it were a pity. I try to see the clouds again and a twinge in my heart reveals their absence. This is a travesty repeated which must be expected. I touch her shoulder with care unrivaled. She awakes at the feel of it. “Love,” I say, “let us walk a bit farther. The beauty here is complete, and I would much prefer to catch it in the act.” Her lips grin but it is her eyes that I fall in love with again. She tells me she would not mind to walk on a day of such beauty. I tell her it is a beauty only rivaled by her own and she places a delicate arm around my waist. I turn to Salem and we walk again, shoes forgotten behind us. They do not mind. The darkening sky hangs over us with a feeling akin to friendship and it pleases us. We come to a small pond here hidden in the field and along the edge is a bench carved roughly of wood. She is delighted and I am unsurprised. I wave to Salem and he nods, face haunted, and his love does not notice. He is younger than I and not yet reconciled to this magnificent, terrible fate we share. He continues through the grasses. This place is the one where I belong. Susannah sinks to the bench and I place myself beside her, my arm wrapped easily around her slim frame. She sighs. “Jericho it is beautiful here. Did you know? Could you?” I smile to myself and rest my head against her soft hair. “No, and you are right. It is breathtaking at this place.” It is not a lie as each time I arrive here the beauty has grown. We sit for a moment, but only a moment until the mirrored world in the water is shattered by drops of water that fall from clouds I closed my eyes to. She shivers and presses her body against mine and she laughs. In that sound is beauty and that sound is my pain. She turns to me with wide eyes and she whispers something I cannot quite catch but soon it fails to matter and her lips are against mine with a pressure I find more than appealing. I am tasting her for the first time for the last time and she tastes like the rain and she tastes like the only thing I’ve ever needed that I know I’ll need again. My heart is bursting with this love and it is breaking because this love is not a new love and I’ve known for too long how the end is written. And then she is pulling away slowly so sad and slow and tears are slipping silently out of her beautiful eyes because in the kiss they are always given understanding in the kiss they are always shown the last lines of this terrible script. She is speaking and I am tearing my heart out of her eyes to hear and she is saying “I will miss you” and I cannot speak through the sobbing. I can never speak when it is ending. Then I am turning because I always do because it is not yet my gift to see when they take her but it is over so quick and when I turn back there is never even a ripple to mark their passing. It is raining and I can’t tell if the tears are still falling and I would still give the world to say it was a pity. Now I am walking into the water that is so much deeper than it looks and their hands are on my legs and their hateful, tragic hands are pulling me down not to end the cycle but to begin it anew.